In this chapter from Fluent Windows 8.1 App Development, you'll jump in at the deep end and build a complete Win8 app so that when we do start working on the details, you’ll know where and how they fit.

This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

In the last chapter we took a quick tour of the Win8 UI and explored some of the benefits it provides to your application. Starting with the next chapter, we’ll spend the next several hundred pages studying Win8 app development in detail.

But first, let’s take another tour. In this chapter, we’ll jump in at the deep end and build a complete Win8 app so that when we do start working on the details, you’ll know where and how they fit.

We’ll start by quickly building the project using one of the project templates provided with Visual Studio and then explore some of the new components of Visual Studio for Win8 app development. Then we’ll add a couple of items that allow your app to interface with Windows 8.1: a contract and a tile. Finally, we’ll run through the Windows Certification process that you’ll need to deploy your app, whether through the store or directly to users.

After we’ve taken the new app for a test run, we’ll back up and examine some of the details that are unique to the Win8 app development process.

Fitting It In

Here’s a very high-level view of a minimal Win8 app. In this chapter we’ll be looking at most of these components, and we’ll come back to the diagram in each chapter so that you’ll know where things fit.